Interoperability Within E-Health Arena:

Integrated care that starts with patients taking care for their health, that includes truly multidisciplinary team approach to treating patients’ conditions and that utilizes enormous existing common knowledge in an efficient way, is one big step towards increasing healthcare provisioning quality while in the same time having healthcare cost under control. The foundation of the integrated care is timely availability of comprehensive information for all stakeholders within healthcare processes independent on their location and information system or application they use. The absolute precondition for this is ability of different IT systems / applications to exchange and display information in a way that is not only comprehensible to all stakeholders but also means the same to all of them. This ability is called interoperability. In this paper, overview of different interoperability aspects for electronic healthcare records / personal healthcare records is given. The main standards / initiatives are explained along with some challenges and possible way forward. Index Terms — Electronic Healthcare Record, Personal Healthcare Record, interoperability EN 13606, openEHR, archetype, HL7 CDA, IHE